I made burgers on the grill and made one for her so she wouldn't have to cook. I gave her a burger and some coleslaw at about 5:30. I went back to my apartment to eat with my husband and take a quick shower. When I went back to ask my mom how she liked the burger and if there was anything else she wanted she was in a full blown stroke seizure. I'm not going to go into details other than half her body was contorted and seizing and the other side was limp. I held her grasping hand in my left hand while I called 911 with my right hand. I was pretty cool considering what was going on. I gave them the address, her age and that I thought it was a stroke and described the symptoms.
The police arrived very quickly, the ambulance did not. We heard it getting nearer and then farther away.......I knew instantly they were lost because of our street being blocked off over 10 years ago by the expansion of the local school and it caused many people to get lost getting here. But, when I told the cops to call the EMTs to tell them how to get here they said, "They're local volunteers. They know this area."
I was trying hard to stay cool while holding onto mom and telling her things were going to be okay knowing it was already turning into a worst case scenario. By this time my husband was out on the front lawn because he knew the same thing as me, they were lost. We heard the ambulance approaching again and then moving away, again. This time I let go of my mom's hand to go out the front door to demand that the sheriffs call them. One was already doing so.
When they finally got here it was a terrible scene of too many people with too many amateur medics and not enough-if any- full time professionals.
I told them it was most likely a stroke and to move her immediately. They didn't.
When they did decide to move her I told them to let my husband and I move her recliner into the center of the room so they could lift her evenly. They didn't. They half dragged her out of her chair by her left arm, the one that was broken less than two years ago.
I asked why they got lost. They told me their mapping system hadn't been updated to show the closing of Center St. A street closure that happened over 10 years ago.
We got to the local hospital before the ambulance. We were forced to wait for a CT scan before the doctor would see her. It was a stroke. The one long shot immediate treatment is
ATP therapy. By the time I was told this my son and his wife were there. They had driven from the UWM area all the way to Burlington before we even got to talk to a doctor. The window for using ATP is 3 hours.
The Burlington hospital is not equipped to administer it. Flight for life had to be called to take mom to St Lukes in Milwaukee and the on board EMTs started the ATP in flight. Hours after I called 911.
So, where do politics come into this horrible nightmare I will live with forever? Here's where. Waterford can't afford a full time professional EMT staff large enough to go to more than one event at a time. High taxes aren't high enough. There is no federal money to spread around to communities like ours because of many factors.
One is that we spend way too much on the military compared to what we spend on local emergency systems. I don't know about you but I'm a whole lot more concerned about having a serious accident or a heart attack over some terrorist cell bombing my neighborhood. You fall off a roof or have a seizure knowing homeland security is spending billions on reading e-mails isn't very comforting.
Another, more insidious reason, is that people are so indoctrinated into thinking that all taxes are bad and evil they don't understand that higher taxes mean a better shot at saving real lives. The lives of our loved ones and ourselves. And, the irony of all ironies is that overwhelmingly the people who claim to value human life over all else are the ones most apt to vote against any tax increases. Even to increase emergency medical services.
The ambulance got lost? Their mapping system isn't up to date? Well, try using fucking MapQuest or Google maps. Here is a huge systemic problem. We have people holding public office that don't even try to grasp the technologies we have at our disposal for free........and they always vote to not raise taxes so they can get re-elected. More irony. Mapquest, Google and Yahoo maps all show exactly where our house is located.
No ATP if you go to the wrong hospital. Have a stoke in the Waterford-Burlington area - sucks for you. Why? Because hospitals long ago melted under the heat of having to show profit margins over showing successful rates of saving lives. Wait for how long for that CT scan? Not enough staff on duty to handle something like this is my guess. Hello politics again. It's called privatization in the medical field. Thanks so much Ronald Reagan.
If all that wasn't enough for me to suffer through the worst part had yet to come. I had to give the order to deny my own mother a feeding tube or any other form of life support. She did have a living will. Unfortunately, after the famous
Terri Schiavo case medical facilities have to make sure that the family is all okay with the patients own request.
I was very lucky because my mom had an excellent neurosurgeon at St Lukes and he insisted that I contact my brothers so I would not have to ever deal with knowing it was my sole direction. Even with that my fear of doing the wrong thing made ask my daughter-in-law to look at the CT scans to confirm the amount of damage so I could avoid a total breakdown from guilt. So, here I go having to give due acknowledgement to those assholes in congress that turned the Schiavo case into a game of political one-upsmanship therefore making countless people a lot more miserable during the hardest times of their lives.
Ninety years ago my grandmother held her two year old daughter, Apolonia Eva, in her arms while pressing the split skull together with rags after Apolonia fell into a concrete window well. There was no ER close by. There was no 911. My mom told me grandma never recovered from that loss and worse my grandfather suffered nightmares over the death the remainder of his life.
Here we are 90 years later and you can live somewhere where you can get DSL with streaming video, iPods and high def TV but you may not survive the wrong medical event.
What's wrong with this picture? Where have the priorities of our government officials gone? Where have society's priorities gone? Finance Wall Street but leave people, including children, the elderly and the needy, without access to state of the art medical care. "Corporate bailouts" have become a regular part of our vocabulary but avoided being tied to taxes. Meanwhile talk of any medical facility not turning a nice profit seems to be comparable to evil incarnate.
BACK TO BLUE RACINE
So, what is the county Dem party up to these days? Oh, defending it's fearless leader's vote against a GLBT center in Racine. Fucking brilliant move on their part, eh? And, I'm pretty sure they're still passing around acrimony like hors d' oevers at the meetings. Then there's this e-mail going around that includes this passage, "We must not get caught up in our personal ambition and singular dogma."-- you know, so you don't lose sight of the bigger picture. *cough* I almost spit water out my nose on that one.
